Signup To Unlock (STU)

Make Visitors Sign Up To Unlock & View Your Freemium Content

Squeeze Pages Are Dead!

We should have named this the “Signup Form On Steroids That Will Skyrocket Your Subscribers And Grow Your List Size By 3700%” Plugin.

But we figured STU might be a tad shorter and way cooler too 🙂

“Sign-Up Gate”: Powered by STU

STU is a WordPress plugin that allows you to “Lock” premium content on a page and allow your visitor to “Unlock” that content only after they “Signup” [hence the name “Signup To Unlock”]. And the subscriber is added to a DAP product (or “list”). No third-party list service required. Just DAP.

Imagine a visitor lands on a page on your site, and reads the beginning of some interesting content – which is your “teaser” – followed by a beautiful signup form that says “Sign up for our list and instantly unlock the rest of this article“.

So you may ask, “What’s the big deal? I already do this with a squeeze page where I collect the visitor’s email address in exchange for sending them a free report or sending them to a hidden page”.

Well, here’s why it’s not the same.

Squeeze Pages: So… 2010!

With the usual squeeze page model, your squeeze page is a different page, and your content page is a different page. You basically have two separate pages to set up, and you always have to make sure you’re only driving traffic to the squeeze page, and not to the actual content page.

Which means there is no real social-proof benefit or SEO benefit. The visitor doesn’t see the actual content page or any part of it until after they’ve signed up. And since the landing page is private or protected, Google and the search engines don’t see any part of that page either.

Instead, consider the STU model.

STU Page Is The New Squeeze Page

With STU, there’s just one page – your actual content page. So you’re basically putting a lock on TOP of your existing content. You can even lock out just a portion of your page or post.

You probably have an existing page with some freemium content – be it an article, a link to a free report or audio, or a premium video. Now simply enable STU on this page, and put a lock on top of this page, and the first-time visitor does not see the locked content until they give you a name and email address.

Combine that with a teaser before and after the locked content, and now you’re locking just one small portion of the page – the most interesting and juiciest part of your content, and that now creates a really cool “cliffhanger” effect, where they have already seen some content, and to read the rest of that page, all they need to do is to give you an email address.

So you’re allowing the user to see the actual page that has the content. So it means they can see the top part, and even the bottom part. They can see other people’s comments, even your sidebar content, your footer content, etc. They basically see your page in all its glory, except for the most interesting part which you’ve locked away behind STU.

Do you think this would convert a whole lot more than the over-used, over-abused squeeze page? Of course it would!

Squeeze-page Blindness

People have become jaded and have developed “squeeze-page blindness“, where they are more than likely to simply exit your page rather than be hit in the face with one more “here we go again!” response-eliciting signup form. And STU brings a refreshing new approach to signup forms.

You may have seen two of our other plugins similar to STU: One of them is our Social Media Popup, and the other is Social Media PageLock. Both of them put a social “Like Gate” on top of existing content, where they have to “Like” your content on one of the big 4 social networks like Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Social likes are great! But what if you actually wanted to primarily build a list first?

That’s where STU gives DAP users a whole lot more power, and allows you to squeeze the visitor’s name and email address and add them to your free DAP product which acts as your list, and then you can use DAP’s autoresponder feature to drip emails and follow up with them over time.

Boring to Brilliant!

All point-type-and-click. Doesn’t get easier than this to set up the plugin.

Want more than just what the standard editor offers? For the hard-core geek who eats HTML for breakfast CSS for brunch, you can create your own custom templates by copying existing files and modifying the HTML or CSS.

And we’ve saved the coolest part for last.

Clicktcha

“Huh??” you say. No problem. You’ll get it in a sec.

If you’ve ever published an open signup form on your site, then you know that the biggest pain for all of us, is spam signups. There are thousands of spam-bots roaming online simply filling up and submitting any form that they can get their creepy little hands on. And every sign up form on every site will eventually get picked up by these spambots, and it’s only a matter of time before you start getting tens or even hundreds of junk signups every day.

Many years ago, the web world came up with something called “Captcha” where they ask you to enter a sequence of text from a weird and wiggly image, something that the spam bots cannot “see”, and only real humans can. The problem with captcha is that if you enforce this extra step on a signup form, then your conversions are going to drop like a crowbar in a well!

At at time when most marketers are going the opposite direction by asking for just an email id, and not even a first name, just so they can get more signups, why would you make it harder for them by making them guess the text from a scrambled captcha image?

That’s why we’ve come up with “Clicktcha“, our own nickname for “Click-based Captcha“.

Basically, you simply show a check-box followed by something like “Yes, I am human” or “Check this if you’re not a robot” (text is fully customizable). And all the subscriber has to do is click on the check-box.

STU gives you the best of three worlds: Great looking signup forms, ability to lock content behind it, and easy to use anti-spam captcha protection to prevent junk signups.

Just Before The Last Scene

So, you think movie trailers do a good job, right? They get you excited about the storyline, and the action or the drama or the romance, so that many of us would go to watch the actual movie.

Now, let’s say your movie was free to watch, and the only way to monetize your movie, it is to get your audience’s contact information.

Now, you could ask them for their email id before they start watching (That would be like asking someone you just met, for their phone number, before you’ve even introduced yourself).

Or you could simply show them most of the movie, and then then just before the ending, you pause at a “cliffhanger” moment, and then say “”Just give me your email address real quick, and I’ll leave you alone to watch the rest of the movie”.

Think folks will think twice about giving you their email address?

That’s why squeeze pages are overrated, and are beginning to lose their luster.

IMPORTANT: STU requires a working installation of DAP. Unlimited-Site License is NOT for use on client sites, JV sites, partner sites, friend/family/church/organization web sites. It is only for use on your own web sites.